“If we'd known everything…”
“What?”
“Your uncle. The railroad. The storm. Children. All of it.”
Clara waited.
“Would you still have stepped off that train?”
She thought carefully.
Henry noticed.
“You're taking too long.”
“This is twenty years.”
“Still.”
Clara looked at him.
“Yes.”
He swallowed.
“Immediately?”
“No.”
Henry frowned.
She smiled.
“I would have looked at you staring at my chair and considered returning to Chicago.”
“That was one minute.”
“Two.”
“One.”
“Two.”
Henry shook his head.
Clara continued.
“Then you would have asked whether I was hungry.”
Henry remembered.
She reached for his hand.
“And I would have stayed.”
The hardest winter came when Henry was sixty-eight.
Not because of weather.
Because he became ill.
Pneumonia.
It started as a cough.
Then fever.
Within three days the physician moved into the guest room.
Clara sat beside Henry's bed.
The house felt strangely similar to that first winter night.
Only reversed.
Henry shivered beneath blankets.
Clara held his hand.
The physician came and went.
Their grown children waited outside.
At midnight Henry opened his eyes.
Clara leaned closer.
“You're here.”
“Where else?”
“Thought you might finally escape.”
“After thirty-four years? Too much invested.”
Henry almost smiled.
Then coughed.
Clara's fear became difficult to hide.
He noticed.
“Don't.”
“What?”
“Look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like the snow night.”
Clara froze.
Henry remembered.
Of course he did.
“You looked terrified.”
“I was.”
“So am I.”
He squeezed her fingers weakly.
“I'm not going anywhere tonight.”
“You don't know.”
“No.”
He breathed carefully.
“But neither did you.”
Clara's eyes filled.
Henry continued.
“And I stayed.”
She leaned forward.
“Because I bullied you awake.”
“Exactly.”
He smiled faintly.
“Your turn.”
Clara stayed with him all night.
Every time he drifted too deeply, she spoke.
Stories.
Arguments.
Complaints.
Anything.
At dawn his fever began falling.
The physician called it a good sign.
Clara went into the hallway.
Then cried against their daughter's shoulder for several minutes.
Henry recovered.
Slowly.
When he could finally sit on the porch again, he found Clara beside him.
“You look terrible,” she said.
“So did you after the blizzard.”
“We're even.”
“No.”
He took her hand.
“Never.”
Henry outlived the cattleman.
The blacksmith.
Most of the men who had known him before marriage.
Clara outlived her uncle by decades.
She never visited his grave.
She received notice of his death and placed the letter inside a drawer.
Henry asked, “Nothing?”
Clara looked toward the mountains.
“I spent enough of my life giving him attention.”
That was all.
She used much of the restored fortune for things her uncle would have hated.
Clinics.
Legal aid.
Scholarships for women studying bookkeeping, medicine, and law.
Assistance for families traveling west.